November 2011

November 28, 2011

Mari Ness at the Tor Books blog is reviewing Madeleine L'Engle's novels, in chronological order, beginning with her first young-adult book, published in 1949, And Both Were Young. (UPDATE: Actually, she's not reading all of them, they won't be in strict chronological order, and And Both Were Young isn't L'Engle's first young-adult book.) L’Engle is best known for her young-adult science fiction (somewhat in the C. S. Lewis vein), especially the Newberry Award winning A Wrinkle in Time. But in addition to her more or less anglophilic young-adult novels, she wrote a handful of more or less anglophilic “women’s novels,” as well as a series of memoirs. None of the adult novels have any science fiction elements, but the more interesting among them do verge on fantasy in the sense of depicting a real world on which things like ghosts and the occult have real effects.

November 27, 2011

The reviews are pretty well unanimous that Anonymous is a silly film. If you’ve missed seeing them, the plot involves the theory that William Shakespeare didn’t write plays, but rather acted as a front man for a nobleman, a member of Queen Elizabeth’s court, because the reputation of a nobleman would be harmed if his name had been attached to plays produced for a commercial audience. There are several different people offered as “candidates” (as those interested in the controversy call them) for the “authorship” of the “works.” Over the centuries, these have included Francis Bacon (a lawyer and scholar, one of the founders of both modern science and modern philosophy) , Christopher Marlowe (a playwright exactly William Shakespeare’s age, who was killed young under dubious, slightly sketchy circumstances), and Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who is the candidate put forward here. “Oxfordians” are said to include some prominent Shakespearean actors, including Derek Jacobi, Mark Rylance, and Michael York, as well as several North American literature professors.

There seem to be two or maybe three kinds of issues that concern people who become convinced that “Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare.” (Here is a link to a discussion thread at an “Oxfordian” site, answering the question, “Why I became an Oxfordian.”) First, William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon was a middle-class boy who attended state-run schools, and stopped attending them in his early teens—while the plays are considered masterworks of the English language, worthy of study by the most learned of people, and with considered allusions not only to high-level political events and to the best theoretical knowledge of the times, but to ancient Greek and Roman texts, as well. People have even found in them apparent allusions to esoteric mysteries of the sort that it’s supposed only a scholar like Bacon could be familiar with. Second, it can appear that the connection between the standard biographies and the available source materials sometimes fail to sustain skeptical scrutiny. Third, some readers and playgoers report that the plays opened up a deeper meaning to them, culturally and emotionally, once they began thinking of them in terms of the works of a specific human being who is emphatically not William Shakespeare.

I have some sympathy with the second of these. It actually is not the case that there are no source materials documenting William Shakespeare’s life. The Riverside edition of Shakespeare, for example, lists all of these and excerpts some, and so does this site (which is maintained by people who find the very idea of “alternate authorship candidates” to be pernicious and anti-intellectual). These few facts, however, are not enough to build a 400-page biography on. Biographies of Shakespeare, like biographies of most historical figures of the early modern period (even kings and queens), include a large portion of conjecture and literary reconstruction. Moreover, throughout the centuries, English and American writers have interwoven their fancies with facts, often producing deeply influential portraits that by now have become part of the culture, as much as the exact words of Hamlet’s famous soliloquies. James Shapiro (in 1599), no less than Virginia Woolf (in Orlando and A Room of One’s Own), builds literary theories on the basis of a Shakespeare who was presented at court, and even had a room at the castle in which to write. The skeptical or scientifically-minded student, who may try to investigate the history as if it were, say, a crime still unrecognized and unknown to the police, can quickly become frustrated.

There are good histories that take account of what we know about the history of the period, often by English scholars of the history of the theatre, with full scholarly apparatus. These even examine practices of collaboration, and of “borrowing” that today we might consider plagiarism. They are, unfortunately, quite expensive, and they are not necessarily intended to affect the literary discourse, but they are not hard to find and they are not hard to read. This is far from the conspiracy theory some “Oxfordians” imagine.

The first and third objections, though, are silly, and I think they are connected. The reason people put Oxford forward as the probable author of “Shakespeare” isn’t just that their interpretation of these canonical works—unlike the accepted interpretation—is that they put forward a strongly aristocratic, Catholic, anti-Reformation point of view, which requires the playwright to have been a Catholic aristocrat who hobnobbed with the Queen’s Catholic opponents.

It’s also that they want everything they see in the plays (and also in the poems: the sonnets, Venus and Adonis, and The Rape of Lucrece) to have been available to the playwright, fully, and consciously. The idea that someone who studied Latin in grammar school, but didn’t graduate from college, could allude, as an adult, to Terence and Virgil and Seneca, doesn’t seem possible to them. The idea that ideas were shared among playwrights, that knowledge of politics was shared among men in coffeehouses, similarly, doesn’t seem possible.

They want to be able to attribute real knowledge to the playwright, to use him as an authority, and they can’t do it if he didn’t quite know what he was talking about, himself. This is not the way skilled readers encounter literature. Playwrights (like novelists and poets) write from a subjective, partial, emotional perspective—they don’t get Ph.D.-level knowledge of a subject so they can invent stories that embody scientific or theoretical truths.

In the 1920s and 1930s there was a large amount of amateur scholarship being produced about Shakespeare. Among lawyers, this sometimes took the form of displaying the depth of Shakespeare’s understanding of law, and then arguing that this meant that the author of the play in question must have been trained in the law. Physicians, similarly, argued that he was a physician. This scholarship doesn’t hold up well. Others went to great lengths to find an actual historical figure who seemed to fit the idea the plays gave them of the author, and they came up with Edward de Vere: a youngish, fairly low-level member of the court, raised in a kind of orphanage run by William Cecil, Baron Burleigh, Elizabeth’s chief minister, specifically for parentless young aristocrats, married unhappily to Burleigh’s own daughter, flirting with Catholicism in the face of Elizabeth’s excommunication by Rome, always complaining about how he was treated and how much money he was being allotted by his betters.

To some extent, I think, the Oxfordian narrative embodies a particular kind of confusion about how imaginative literature is written, and it could be interesting for that reason. There have been literary fronts in history (see The Front), and at times literature has been used politically (as Clare Asquith notes, applying her experiences with the arts of the former Soviet Union to the situation of Elizabethan England). There is a lot of collaboration—huge teams of writers on Hollywood television shows, unnamed script doctors and collaborators on Hollywood films, novel factories that “touch up” stories drafted by the named author—that often goes unrecognized. There are interesting new-historical questions about “social energies” that are harnessed by great writers, but not literally created by those writers ab ovo—and there are interesting cultural questions about where those social energies really do originate, and how they do.

I somehow have a feeling that Anonymous, from the creator of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, will itself say nothing particularly interesting about those questions. But since—as more than one reviewer suggested might be necessary to make sense of the plot—I already have some sense of the differences between the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Leicester, and the Earl of Southampton—I will probably watch it anyway. If you don’t, you may prefer reading James Shapiro’s recent book, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?. Or watch HBO’s miniseries with Helen Mirren as Elizabeth I, and learn what those differences are.

November 22, 2011

This, from about a week ago, probably will only be meaningful for those who already know about the roots of current “libertarian” thinking in the writings of the mid-twentieth century economists, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek (apparently non-libertarian conservatives are also influenced by them), and in fact I don’t know enough about economics myself to understand all of it, but I thought these paragraphs from economics professor Brad de Long were interesting:

The point of view underlying von Mises's—and von Hayek, and Marx, and Ron Paul—complaint against Fiat money in general and monetary management of the business cycle in particular is this: that value comes from human sweat and toil, not from being clever. Thus it is fine for money to have value if it is 100% backed by gold dug from the earth by sweat and machines and muscles (even if there is no state of the possible future world in which people actually want to exchange their pieces of paper for the gold that supposedly backs it). But it is not fine for money to have value simply because it is useful for buying things. There is, von Mises—andMarx, and von Hayek, and Ron Paul—think, something profoundly wrong on an economic and on a moral level with procedures that create value that is not backed by, in Marx's case, human labor, and in von Mises's and von Hayek's case human entrepreneurial ingenuity. And in its scarier moments this train of thought slides over to: "good German engineers (and workers); bad Jewish financiers".

Note that this does not just apply to fiat money produced by a government.

This applies to all financial market asset valuations in excess of capital cost of production (or perhaps the value of the inventions of the gigantic Krell-like brain of John Galt). They are, to von Mises, all cheats.

This (which, as de Long points out, also applies to Marx’s labor theory of value), does say that because “value comes from human sweat and toil,” the price of edible dandelion roots foraged from a meadow should always be less than the price of a big boulder that was dug out of my yard so a sewer line could be put in place. It doesn’t, however, imply that it is somehow cheating to ask a neighbor or friend for help, even with trivial things like opening a package or fastening a necklace, which would just be silly. Though I’m not sure why “value comes . . . not from being clever” isn’t supposed to remove the real value from “the inventions . . . of John Galt.”

But I thought of this again when I read, recently, an essay by Martha Nussbaum, a professor of philosophy, law, and religion, on the objectification and harassment of women on the Internet (in The Offensive Internet, a volume she co-edited). She discusses

the tendency of some societies to define the ideal adult as self-sufficient, independent, lacking in deep needs with respect to others. In many societies, such pictures are held out to young people—but far more often to males than to females. The idea of the "real man" as someone who is never weak, never dependent, always in control, is a very common feature of developmental patterns in countless societies, but certainly in ours, which so strongly valorizes the lone cowboy who can provide for himself without the help of any others.

Even though, even taken to an extreme, the point of view Brad de Long attributes to people like Marx and Ron Paul and Ludwig von Mises applies only to economic theory, not to the details of ordinary people’s mundane lives, it does sound as though this economic theory supports—since Ayn Rand has already been brought into the discussion—what her novels’ villains condemn as “rugged individualism,” and what Nussbaum suggests is, in some places and at some times, considered appropriate for all men but for no women.

November 15, 2011

In an episode last Tuesday, titled “Occupy Hollywood,” critic Garen Daley was interviewed by Callie Crossley on NPR about “the history of social movements through American cinema.” I’d like to listen to the episode again, but I wonder about some of his choices. Talking about Angels with Dirty Faces, which at one time was my absolute favorite old-time movie, Daley claims that what made the story acceptable to an audience, as a film with a good message, was the happy ending. My recollection is that the final scene of Angels with Dirty Faces has James Cagney being executed, in the electric chair. That doesn’t seem like a happy ending. I suppose what he has in mind is the fact that Cagney goes out, not defying death and Society, but crying for his mother and asking whoever’s out there listening for forgiveness—not because he really repented, arguably, but because he wants the Dead End Kids listening, who look up to him, to abandon their own lives of crime. That moment is, assuredly, a heartwarming one, which affirms the meaning of the film for the audience leaving the theater. But to call it, not even tragic, but “happy,” to me seems peculiar.

November 13, 2011

On Friday, after a couple of days of unseasonably warm weather, well up into the 60s, it was surprisingly cold. Instead of getting into the high 50s, the temperature barely reached 50 degrees Fahrenheit all day. The leaves were falling quickly, and instead of a curtain of yellow at the back of my house, by end end of the day, out my back window there was nothing longer anything to block the much too early dusk. It reminded me of this famous poem by Emily Dickinson, which usually makes me think of the lingering February snow:

There's a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons— That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes—

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us— We can find no scar, But internal difference, Where the Meanings, are—

None may teach it— Any— 'Tis the Seal Despair — An imperial affliction Sent us of the Air—

When it comes, the Landscape listens— Shadows— hold their breath— When it goes, 'tis like the Distance On the look of Death—

It also made me think of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, which previewed on cable the other night. It was on a channel I didn't even think we get, and I only noticed it because I wanted something to watch while I folded laundry. I watched it under un-ideal conditions, starting in the middle, then watching most of the first half from the start, not bothering to watch part of the middle, and not under terrific sound conditions either. But I didn’t like it. I did like both Dogville and Manderlay, and I could almost see the point of Europa, though I didn’t like it much. This quasi-review could be considered to be by way of convincing my husband that he—who didn’t like any of those three films the very slightest bit, and who I’d pretty much predicted will absolutely hate Melancholia if he ever sees it—should ignore reviews like the one by Andrew O’Hehir in Salon, and not bother to rent it when it becomes available on DVD. The post grew out of a series of IM’s along the lines of “did that Salon guy really like it? nothing happened for two and a half hours. and music was really awful. he said what about the music?”

The film has two parts, named for two sisters: Justine, played by Kirsten Dunst, and Claire, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg. (Like Dunst, Gainsbourg is excellent, but I’m sorry to say that I haven’t seen her in anything.) These happen to be the names of characters in two of the most important French language novels of the eighteenth century: Julie, or la Nouvelle Héloïse, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the Marquis de Sade’s sadistic response to Julie, Justine. Claire is not the heroine of Rousseau’s novel, but the heroine’s sensible, somewhat put-upon cousin. “Justine is a reversal of the Nouvelle Héloïse,” wrote Mario Praz in The Romantic Agony, an exceedingly important book about the Romantic movement that I read a very long time ago. However, as far as the film is concerned, I don’t know what this means.

In a kind of prologue, we see dream sequences, some imagined and surrealistic and fitting in with the rest of the story, some very strange but from scenes that will become obvious by the second part of the film, and some depicting the time just before and just after the events that end the film. (This is not much of a spoiler unless you are totally innocent of the film’s publicity. In fact, if like me you saw the end before the beginning, the beginning might leave you still wondering whether what you thought had happened really did.)

(THERE ARE SPOILERS AFTER THIS. Skip to the end to reach the more general discussion again.)

The first half of the movie is Justine’s wedding reception, at her sister’s house. It’s almost impossible to know what’s going on here. Justine first appears to be a free spirit, then begins to seem unstable, and finally seems—possibly—depressed—but if the word Melancholia weren’t in the title, you might never know. Her behavior is outrageously inappropriate. She's hours late for the reception and then leaves the guests further, for hours at a time. It’s not only as if she doesn’t know how to behave at a wedding: it’s as if she doesn’t know she is actually at her own wedding.

Though others’ behavior is inappropriate, too. Her boss keeps tailing her throughout the reception, trying to get her to write her daily copy for him. (She is a copywriter whose promotion to art director, perhaps surprising enough in itself, her boss announces during the toasts.) In fact, her behavior is just what you’d expect in a dream. She wanders around the house and forgets what she was supposed to be doing.

There’s nothing wrong with a film that’s dreamlike, but this plot summary makes it sound much more exciting than it is. Really, nothing happens. People eat. People toast the bride and groom. The wedding cake is cut. The bride’s nephew is put to bed. The guests troupe outside and down the bride’s brother-in-law’s private golf course to drink champagne and set off paper balloons with good wishes written on them, like something out of La Dolce Vita. Every shot is about five times longer than feels necessary. We're just sitting in the audience, watching. And what dialogue there is has no connection that I can see with Justine’s apparent depression; it feels thoroughly arbitrary.

It is possible, obviously, to dredge up a coherent storyline from surrealist storytelling like this—and O’Hehir tries—but that seems to me to flatten out what’s most interesting about it, at the same time that it absolves the artist in advance for not really bothering to depict things for himself, and I guess I just don’t see the point.

I must have found the second half more interesting, since I sat through it well past the time I’d intended to go to bed, and even watched all of the first half, in order to find the connecting link: how people realized there was a second planet hurtling more or less in the direction of our own, and how all those people were gotten out of the brother-in-law’s house, leaving only Justine, Claire, and Claire’s husband and child. The answer to this last question is that the wedding was some time ago, and the guests went home days before. Now, it seems, Justine is so depressed that she can barely manage to get into a taxicab that someone else has hired and has waiting by the curb. Claire doesn’t seem especially fond of her sister, but is determined to help her.

She is worried about the planet, barely glimpsed the night of the wedding, but now discovered and studied and named “Melancholia. Her husband, however, who is some unspecified kind of scientist, says there’s nothing to worry about. He chides her for “going on the Internet again,” and says “the real scientists” know that the idea the earth is in danger is simply alarmism. Well before the end of the film, Claire is herself depressed, and mostly sits on her terrace, often asleep. All four of them gather there daily to observe the progress of Melancholia. Will it strike, or will it pass by and leave all of them unharmed?

I sat through the end to find out, and I was sorry I’d bothered.

(SPOILERS END HERE.)

O’Hehir has an entirely different interpretation of the characters’ motivations than mine, which he's entitled to. He also loves the artistic aspects of Melancholia, which I agree are fine, but which I don’t think add up to anything.

He starts with the assumption that Von Trier’s film is “the ultimate cinematic expression of the German Romantic aesthetic, which was an enormous source of inspiration for Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich,” and gives the Salon reader a deep interpretation along those lines.

First, O’Hehir explains that the score is using some fairly well-known music from Wagner’s overture to Tristan und Isolde, an opera that romanticizes the wish for death. Then he explains how the movie refers to other well regarded films, including those in which the major actors of this one—John Hurt, Charlotte Rampling, Stellan Skarsgård—have previously appeared. So, from the point of view of someone who’s educated about film, Melancholia is very meaningful. I won’t deny that someone who’s very educated about film will have a more worthwhile opinion, in many ways, than someone who isn’t. But even setting aside that these particular meaningful facts are fairly specialized even for most very sophisticated filmgoers, I do want to deny that allusions are enough to make deeply meaningful art.

I didn’t recognize the Tristan theme, and without this recognition, the recurring ultra-romantic orchestral music just reads as overwrought and inappropriate. The cold cinematography and minimalist plot felt spoiled by the inadvertent addition of schmaltz. Every time I heard the orchestral music, I wished it was something more recent, something twentieth-century, something spare and stark like the Musica ricercata by György Ligeti that Stanley Kubrick used in Eyes Wide Shut. By now the Tristan theme and music that sounds like it registers simply love, without the death. Only by recalling the sentence, This is music by Richard Wagner that signifies the Liebestod or Love-Death, would the filmgoer have the experience O'Hehir describes.

Similarly, although I recognize John Hurt, Stellan Skarsgård, and Charlotte Rampling by sight, I’ve seen almost nothing that they’ve appeared in. I’ve seen none of the films Andrew O’Hehir marks as possible influences for this one. Yes, that’s my failing and not the filmmaker’s, but the question is, how much energy should an artist draw from other works that he or she alludes to only in the barest, most tenuous, sense? Is a film (or a novel) that depends, so heavily as this one seems to, on allusions that are detectable only on an intellectual level, and then only at a couple of levels of (sheerly logical) remove, a deep one, or is it shallow?

And yes, those visual shots are beautiful. But they are static. The same angle is shown over and over again, as if the film were instead a painting in some style suspended halfway between nineteenth century decadence and twentieth century minimalist futurism.

What O’Hehir’s insistence that Melancholia is in the tradition of German Romanticism reminds me mostly of are the twentieth century paintings from this exhibition. One of the most striking things about that show, which divided up artists by region (England; France and Spain; Germany and Russia) was how sentimental and soft-edged the German paintings seemed—for the most part—by contrast with the French ones. The placards all explained how much the painters had been influenced by the most shocking recent French styles. But in that age without television, Internet, or cheap color reproductions, few of them can have actually seen the paintings they were trying to imitate. All they saw were words.

November 10, 2011

Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler wrote a well known book called Nudge (not “noodge”), arguing that various social policy should be set up in a way that “nudges” people towards doing things that policymakers thing they should do. For example, if policymakers think more people should invest in 401K plans, employers should be required to make 401K contributions a default. People would have to opt out of their employer’s 401K plan if they didn’t want to make contributions, rather than (as now) having to opt in if they did want it. It does make sense to arrange defaults appropriately, both to decrease the amount of work people have to do (human resources workers as well as employees), and to encourage or discourage certain actions (modifying a thermostat to encourage energy savings, might be another example, or setting printer defaults to minimize paper use).

On the other hand, the way Sunstein and Thaler discuss “nudging” can sound a bit nanny-state-ish. Henry Farrell, a political science professor, and Cosma Shalizi, a professor of statistics, have written an article in the New Scientist (via Crooked Timber) criticizing their views. I agree with their argument, but there is, I think, a problem with the “nudge” theory that I have never seen addressed. Farrell and Shalizi write:

…[T]he key problem with “nudge” style paternalism [is] presuming that technocrats understand what ordinary people want better than the people themselves. There is no reason to think technocrats know better, especially since Thaler and Sunstein offer no means for ordinary people to comment on, let alone correct, the technocrats’ prescriptions.

Nor will they ever be able to. “Nudging” is nonverbal. It doesn’t give people the ability to understand their situation better. It doesn’t give people the ability to discuss their situation better. It doesn’t give people the ability to provide the nudgers with extra feedback.

Worse, it lessens people’s ability to deal with the real world. Before the nudge was implemented, people were at least somewhat able to discuss policies, like compensation, on their merits. Afterwards, everything ordinary people suggest will mess up the nudging part of the policy.

Anyone who’s worked in a reasonably large organization will recognize what’s likely to happen next: any suggestion for improvement will be met with objections along the lines of: that’s not what’s really at stake here. But it is what’s really at stake!

It would become impossible to discuss or decide anything except at the topmost levels. There, presumably, are personnel who know how to discuss both aspects of policy and can take account of nudging as well as ordinary practices. But before the nudge, those people delegated a lot of that work to lower-level personnel, who afterward will have slipped out of the loop. And the nudge, in the first place, was implemented by people outside the organization, not those within it. So how this could possibly work is far from clear. What’s more likely is total sclerosis, as nothing changes significantly at a policy level, and things either fall apart or rules are modified surreptitiously and unofficially, day to day.

The idea of the “nudge” seems, on paper, to presuppose that organizations work by choosing (or falling into) a set of rules that define every decision ahead of time, at a very detailed level. If this were literally true, then, we would expect to find a group of architects, highly educated, well aware of everything that needs to be known (practically, theoretically, politically, strategically), who think about policy; and also a group of workers who don’t think about any of this at all. For the latter group of people, presumably, it would be an exaggeration to say that they do what they’re told or that they make decisions by applying rules; they would have to make decisions unconsciously on the basis of rules they’ve somehow internalized but can’t actually articulate. Yet their rules could be changed—by the nudge—on a fairly short timescale. But that isn’t much like what really happens, and isn’t especially plausible.

Most people, most of the time, are a combination of the former and latter groups. “Nudging,” as Farrell and Shalizi show, is undemocratic because it makes it more difficult for them to carry out the former functions. But more than that, it seems to assume an extremely implausible picture of society.

(Now if I could only nudge my three year old to sleep past 6:30 AM now that we’ve moved the clocks back an hour.)

November 06, 2011

Shortly after my last post here, I started a project for a longish blog post that would require a fair amount of reading, which has been taking up most of my time. I’ve begun and abandoned a few posts to fill the gap, but first the reading turned out to take longer and be much more absorbing than I’d expected (books in genres I don’t usually read, brick-like enough to encourage a glad switch back to the Kindle), and then real-life events intervened, and then the “quick” post I had in mind turned out to need longer to write than I have right now.

(Incidentally, here are things I’d like to see available on the Kindle, or whatever the next generation of e-book reader will be: More foreign books—it would be nice to be able to buy books from amazon.fr or amazon.de for my US-based Kindle. And more classics of history and social science from the past fifty years. There is already a good, though not perfect, selection of recent books on social science, politics, and history, which is probably something we can thank the hordes of tech-savvy wonks and bloggers for.)

So I could blog about the sudden breakdown of my clothes dryer with half my daughter’s wardrobe in it, and how if I’d done the laundry on Friday instead of Sunday, we would have had the whole weekend to shop for a new one—but, also, it might have broken while we were out of the house, and burned all the clothes. And how I wasted most of a day trying to research new washers and dryers online, figuring it might be time to replace the 1975-era washing machine too (which works perfectly well except that the “warm” water is better described as “cool,” and probably isn’t very efficient, and is so old and low-tech it just plain looks silly), only to discover that the question of the modern high-efficiency washer is a highly vexed one, and give up and decide to buy the simplest dryer I could find—only to learn that the online description of its dimensions was off by just enough that it wouldn’t fit through the door.

Or I could blog about how, at just about this time last year, and the year before, right after my daughter’s birthday party, I got sick, and how I ended up being sick almost continually last year from November until almost May—though this time I got sick two weeks before the party, and since then so far I seem okay. Or my attempts to determine whether the sore throat I’ve been waking up with every morning is from a cold, allergies, or acid reflux. Though it does appear to be the last of these (it can be preempted using Pepcid), and so far I’m not sick, just tired from pre-party cleaning and from swimming in my daughter’s swim class to the deep end of the pool with her, for the first time in half a year and ve-e-ery slowly.

I could write about the movie Howl, and whether it is somehow cheating to have the original Ginsberg poem’s imagery displayed for you on a screen so you can understand the metaphors without doing the thinking for yourself—and whether it is actually possible to read all the words of the Neal Cassady section of the poem without having them read for you as a voiceover to a cartoon.

But I will blog, fairly briefly, about modern literature, and women in modern literature.

One of the novels I value most these days is American Pastoral, by Philip Roth. The plot of the novel involves a successful Jewish-American businessman whose daughter, in the political turmoil of the 1960s, joins up with the Weathermen and bombs the local post office, killing the owner of the grocery store in which the PO’s located. She disappears, and twenty years later, he finds her living a life of squalor in a slumland squat, doing a kind of penance and renunciation through a form of Jainism (involving the refusal to do violence to any living thing) which she has worked out for herself through reading and introspection. Most of the novel consists of her father’s tortured attempts to work out what—in America, in his own parenting, in the belief systems of the other adults who helped her over the years—possibly could have resulted in both her crime and her unacceptable religious beliefs. He rakes over her situation with the utmost of empathy of which he’s capable, but ultimately he fails to comprehend the path she chose. He condemns her along with the society that made her that way, even as he is too much of a conformist to stand apart from society in any real way.

It’s the painstaking and thoughtful recreation of the emotional dilemmas faced by the girl and her father, the novelist’s willingness to implicate the father’s own beliefs and his way of life in actions he repudiates, and the selection of both male and female characters to illustrate various modes of being in the society he depicts, that I find appealing. The moral, if there is any, isn’t on the surface, any more than it is in any other novel—there are some obvious “morals,” if a reader had to have them, like don’t commit murder, or don’t trust in wealth to preserve your family from misfortune, but the question of what could have helped these characters more isn’t answered—and I don’t assume that I would agree in full with Philip Roth’s take on their lives if I knew it. (In fact, although I’ve been tempted to see these painstaking moments of empathy with female characters as a refutation of the broadly accepted notion of Roth’s general misogyny, I’ve ultimately concluded that they’re overwhelmed by the rest of his writing, that moments is all they are.)

But when I declared, on Internet discussion forums, that American Pastoral, along with The Ghost Writer and Zuckerman Unbound, were my favorites among all Roth’s novels, I was told, by male participants, in no uncertain terms, that I was wrong. Roth’s best novels are those, like Sabbath’s Theater, they said, that foreground the male id and the issues (in our society and given the realities of aging) that surround exuberant male sexuality. There was no discussion, there was no admission that a preference for one novel over another may largely involve subjective factors, there was only a flat statement that I was wrong. There was no explanation. The idea may have been that those novels are more characteristic of Roth’s writing—maybe given the long view of his work as a whole, maybe given the idea of Roth as essentially a novelist of exuberantly aggressive sexuality and rebellion—and maybe because they took those apparently more characteristic novels as a condemnation of the author, or maybe because they equated characteristic with best. The idea may have been that those themes always make for better literature, or the idea may have been that those novels are better because they are less political. The idea may have been that those novels spoke well for the men making the claim, a subjective claim, if surreptitiously so. Whatever the underlying reasons, if I tried to give reasons for my preference, their response was to insist that no possible reason could cause them to change their minds.

It seemed as if they were claiming that they could speak for the entire literary world, and that no alternative was possible. They did not seem to envision the possibility of discussion about the merits of one novel over another, or of one way of writing novels over another. They seemed, on the contrary, thoroughly invested in the concept of modern literature as the self-expression of a callow young man whose interests are eternally opposed to the needs of “the community”—entire shelves of novels the reader could take or leave depending on whether that character’s interests aligned with her own, but with which she could not dispute.